Ground Zero

IT’S dirty, hard and tireless work, made tougher by the vagaries of
the seasons, fickle markets and spiralling expenses.

As many in the
game will tell you, farming is a mug’s game at the best of times.

But as the communities dotted along the Murray River will tell you too, these are far from

the best of times.

For
the first time in living memory, thousands of farming families along
the river system, the same families that put wine in your glass and food
on your plate, are facing the prospect of zero water allocations for
the coming irrigation season.

Those with long memories can well
remember the swelling floods of 1956. But they can’t remember a time
when walking away from everything they have worked for, with little more
than the shirt on their backs and crippling debt, seemed like the best
of a bad bunch of options.

A time when the difference between lush green
trees, and crisp, brown, lifeless crops, was just a matter of weeks,
and the swish of a pen in Canberra.

Greg Barila takes a road trip
through the Riverland to Mildura to find out what happens to thriving
communities when the water stops flowing.

IN THE heart
of the city of Mildura, William Benjamin Chaffey stands proudly on his
statue pedestal, surveying the progress of the fertile irrigated
community he and his elder brother George helped conjure out of ‘‘the
hissing desert’’ in the late 19th Century.

The Canadian engineers,
who earlier had turned Los Angeles into the first fully electrically
lit city in the world, came to the district on the invitation of
Australia’s second Prime Minister, Alfred Deakin, then a minister in the
Victorian Government.

Their settlements proved to be financial
failures but a triumph of engineering.

Reads the plaque beneath
W.B’s statue: “He was the moving spirit and for many years, President of
The Dried Fruits Association, which in time of stress saved these
settlements from extinction.”

One hundred and twenty years on,
with Murray infl ows at record lows, the threat of extinction for the
dozens of towns in the Murray Darling fruit bowl seems just as real as
it was the day the Chaffeys turned the first sod.

Whether the
drought will break these towns depends on who you talk to. But none
would dare say things here are anything but very, very grim.

Barbara
Harris, 75, retired to Barmera from Adelaide about seven years ago. Her
son runs a carting business during the wine grape season. This vintage,
business was down about a third.

“This year was bad. But next year, if it doesn’t rain, your guess for that is as good as anybody else’s,” Harris says.

“They’re
talking about closing Lake Bonney; I mean, that’s the tourist
attraction for the Riverland. Close that, people are not going to come.

“In addition to all that, it’s the cost of living itself. I mean, everything’s going to go sky high.

If you take a look at the big picture of it, it’s pretty scary.”

Up
the road, third-generation farmer Richard Swinstead, 57, runs 300 acres
of vines and citrus. Immaculately manicured, his young trees are
verdant and healthy. By next year they may be leafless skeletons.

“I don’t know what we’re going to do,” Swinstead says simply, as his dogs take turns mauling a tennis ball.

“We’ve all got loans to service, we’ve got employees. It’s huge infrastructure we’ve built up over the years.”

Like
many large-scale farmers, Swinstead wouldn’t get much change out of $6
million if he had to rebuild his business from scratch.

And with up to six years before citrus trees start producing, how many farmers, if they could afford to, would bother?

If
Prime Minister John Howard’s prayers for rain are answered, things
could turn around as quickly as they have soured, but Swinstead says
rain dances are a poor substitute for hard infrastructure, foresight and
good government policy.

“They’ve sat on their hands and all they’re doing is praying for rain.

“If
it doesn’t rain it’s going to be a catastrophe for the country. It
won’t be a Depression but it will be billions of dollars. There will
beramifications right through the cities.”

Too little, he says, is
being done to prevent evaporation from major lakes or to prohibit
companies and managed investment schemes from sucking the rivers dry to
fill dams for plantings that are not even in the ground yet.

“Legally
they can do it because they’ve obviously gone out and bought the water
off dairy farms but morally, it’s totally wrong.”

A couple of
hours up the road and a stone’s throw across the border in Mildura,
water is the topic on everyone’s lips, more precisely the fear that soon
there may not be much to wet them.

The fountains don’t fl ow these days, but the town is as pretty as usual. But for how long?

Tony Roccisano runs one of the bigger real estate agencies in town.

“I’ve
been in it for 27 years. It’s probably the most worrying times that
I’ve experienced,’’ he said.

“The farming sector, it’s a mixed bag, most
of them are doing it very, very hard but then you have pockets of
people who are doing very well with fresh fruit and also there are some
good operators on citrus.

“I know a lot of farmers are now putting in cash crops to try and stay afloat.”

Not
that he’s had a run on farmers falling over themselves to sell their
properties. For a start, who’d be mad enough to buy a farm with useless
water rights?

“A lot of them know that if they do put them on the
market there’s not much demand for them so they’re holding off, hoping
that the market will improve.”

Vernon Knight is the executive
director of community and social welfare organisation Mallee Family Care
and a member of thecity council. You can see WB’s statue from his
office across the road.

What Chaffey might have to say about the current crisis has never occurred to him but he’s worried for his own part.

“Here
we are in the fastest growing regional inland centre in Australia
facing the threat of the absence of the essential commodity. I mean, no
water, clearly no Murray Valley, no Mildura,” Knight says.

“I
think Mildura still has a future but it will be much more difficult, as
it will be for all the irrigation areas,” says Nationals MP and member
for Mildura Peter Crisp.

It’s Sunday afternoon and Crisp, himself a citrus farmer, is in his office.

A
sure and quick talker, he is a font of information, flipping through a
stack of reports on his desk, unfurling maps and scurrying between rooms
to point out the litany of ideas he’s working on to squeeze a precious
few hundred megalitres of water out of the system.

Most of them
revolve around sucking “dead storage” from various lakes and wetlands to
help growers on the NSW side of the river finish their crops. It’s a
topic close to home.

For the past 24 years my father, Joe, 60, has run
a citrus farm at Gol Gol, a few kilometres from Mildura. He’s no
stranger to difficult times.

During the 1980s, growers were nearly
crippled by interest rates up to 18 per cent and the slashing of
tariffs, which opened the flood gates to the scourge of cheap Brazilian
fruit juice concentrate.

One of my earliest memories is of picketing
outside the local juice factory against the imports that werethreatening
to take bread from our mouths.

The monkey on his back now is the fragility of the water supply. What will he do with a zero allocation?

“We’ll go back to zero too,” he says. “Back to where we started.”

“I just don’t want to think about it.”

My sister, Connie, and her family, work the business too. What’s happening around her breaks her heart, makes her angry.

“Why is the government spending money in far-flung places when our own people are suffering?” she demands to know.

“I feel most sorry for growers like dad. All he has is this property.”

“After
all these years of employing hundreds of people and paying taxes he may
be forced to walk away with nothing, nothing to show for all these
years of work.

“Farmers are adept at making changes, we adapt to unforeseen circumstances every day.

“But with no water, there are no possibilities and that’s frightening.”

Meanwhile, there’s William Benjamin Chaffey still overlooking the future of his settlements.

Just what kind of future he sees is anybody’s guess. A penny for your thoughts, Mr Chaffey?

This article was first published in Adelaide's The Independent Weekly, April 28, 2007.